Park Ridge resident Dennis Sladky has spoken thoughtfully about flooding at several Park Ridge City Council meetings. But his letter to the editor (“Park District’s land grab is greedy,” Park Ridge Herald-Advocate, September 23) reflects a misunderstanding of recent actions by the Park Ridge Park District.

In fairness to Mr. Sladky, however, his misunderstanding seems to have been caused by the inept and heavy-handed way the Park District presented its proposal for letting the City use Northwest Park as part of its flood control program.

The premise of his letter is that the Park District is using its permission for the City to use Northwest Park as a flood water detention to extort the City out of an excessive amount of compensation, including the former public works facility at Greenwood and Oakton, a property reportedly appraised at $1.8 million. Mr. Sladky sees this as a sign the Park District is callously holding approximately 450 Northwest Park area flood-prone residents hostage.

First of all, Mr. Sladky seems to be making a mistake common to many/most residents: thinking that the City’s taxpayers are the same as the Park District’s taxpayers. Although the overlap is substantial, the City’s boundaries are not the same as the Park District’s, meaning that certain City taxpayers are not Park District taxpayers, and vice versa. That’s why the City and the Park District are two separate taxing bodies with two separate governing bodies.

Chalk that up to the absurdity that is Illinois government, with more governmental units – 6,968 – than any other state: over 2,000 more than Pennsylvania, the first runner-up in governmental inefficiency with 4,871. As if we needed 2,000 more ineptly and/or corruptly-managed governmental units.

Absurdity notwithstanding, the City Council and the Park Board are duty-bound to look out for their own provincial interests. Which is why, before the Park District can offer Northwest Park to the City for storm water detention, it owes its taxpayers a duty to lock the City into a binding legal obligation to minimize, and then repair, any damage to that park caused by the storm water.

That kind of guaranty is an appropriate quid pro quo for the Park District’s cooperation with the City’s flood control project for that area.

We suspect Mr. Sladky’s perception of over-reaching by the Park District came from the District’s September 10 letter to the City, in which Park District Exec. Director Gayle Mountcastle appears to link the District’s permission for the City’s use of Northwest Park to the City’s agreement to a variety of other District demands – including the City’s unmet TIF obligations to the District, a new City lease of the Salt Dome at Oakton, the District’s acquisition of the old City garage at Greenwood and Elm, and a variety of Northwest Park amenities like a “trail system for the park” and “tiered concrete retaining walls and stadium-style seating.”

We can find no evidence of the Park Board’s directing Mountcastle to draft up such a list of demands and figuratively nail them to the door of City Hall, Martin Luther-style. So we’ll chalk that up to Mountcastle’s one-dimensional, zero-sum view of the Park District-City relationship.

Any deal to use Northwest Park as a storm water detention area should stand on its own, and not be tied to other deals. The City and its taxpayers need to ensure the Park District and its taxpayers that any damage to Northwest Park from storm water detention will be prevented and/or remediated by the City.

But flood control should not be made dependent on other unrelated matters, such as whether the City can satisfy its Uptown TIF-related obligation to the Park District by selling the Greenwood and Elm former public works garage property for $1 – even if such an Uptown TIF deal may make sense in its own right.

Unfortunately, the Park Board apparently gave Executive Director Mountcastle a free hand to deal with these issues. And, not surprisingly, Mountcastle bungled them with her stupid and seemingly extortionate linkage of unrelated projects to the Northwest Park storm water detention deal.

We’re always looking to see how our two local school districts are doing in comparison to the schools in other comparable upper-level communities.

That’s because we believe that top-shelf schools at a reasonable price can be a difference-maker for folks considering moving to not-inexpensive suburbs like Park Ridge. And even at a high price, top-shelf schools can still add enough value to be a difference-maker.

Which should mean better education for the kids and higher property values for the taxpayers.

But as we’ve pointed out repeatedly, although Park Ridge public schools are better than most they no longer appear to rank among the very best – judging by the annual ISAT-based rankings that both Chicago newspapers (and sometimes Chicago magazine) put out – despite Park Ridge taxpayers continuing to pay top-shelf prices for those schools.

Over-payment for under-performance is never a good strategy.

So a recent Park Ridge Journal article with the title “District 64 Prepares For Strategic Planning” (09.11.14) caught our eye. It talked about how Park Ridge-Niles School Dist. 64, with one year still left on former Supt. Sally Pryor’s five year strategic plan, is looking to hire a consultant to assess where the District’s current situation. And new D-64 superintendent Laurie Heinz wants that assessment to be “a nice, objective look from highly trained professionals.”

Heinz’s consultant of choice? The Consortium for Educational Change (“CEC”).

Note the key words in the name: “educational change.” Not “educational excellence.” Not “educational achievement.” Not “educational improvement.” Not even “educational hope and change.”

Just “educational change.”

That’s because “change” is no longer merely inevitable: it’s now actually considered good. “New” – as in “different” – has replaced “new and improved,” presumably because novelty is all we need. The tiny-brained folks, encouraged by marketers, advertisers and politicians, now embrace anything new or different so long as it doesn’t require them to do the heavy lifting of determining whether that new or different is actually better.

And if better, whether the benefits meet or exceed the costs.

Then again, cost-benefit analyses are not the forte of most public school teachers and administrators. That holds true at D-64, including its School Board members who should be focused on the bottom line both educationally and financially. It comes as no shock, then, that the D-64 Board apparently has endorsed Heinz’s choice of CEC.

“[A] nonprofit organization affiliated with the Illinois Education Association that works with teachers, school and district administrators, school boards and unions to improve student learning and achievement.”

In other words, it’s a teachers union-dominated private corporation with the audacity to claim that its goal is…wait for it…educational achievement. Even if, by all outward appearances, “change” seems to be its greater concern.

And since it’s a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation, there are no pesky shareholders looking over CEC management’s shoulders making sure the services it provides are competent and valuable enough to generate profits that can be paid to those shareholders as dividends. That leaves CEC free to be a one-trick pony: a shameless cheerleader for unaccountable educators and administrators who hire it – presumably using taxpayer funds – to tell them what they want to hear.

What the D-64 Board, teachers and administrators DON’T want to hear is anything about ISAT-based performance rankings. Which is why a more-than-cursory Google search failed to disclose any public acknowledgement of those kinds of rankings by the D-64 Board or administration since Sally Pryor pushed the adoption of her “Journey of Excellence”plan four years earlier, before retiring with her guaranteed $183,400/year pension, avec COLAs.

Which is curious, given that one of the “Parameters” on page 2 of the “Strategic Plan Components” from the D-64 website states: “Student performance on the Illinois Standards Achievement Tests (ISATs) will always compare favorably with other high-achieving districts.”

Although edu-speak often is a totally foreign language, in common English the term “compare favorably with” customarily means “is better than.”

Does D-64 really need to hire a consultant like CEC to tell it how close it hasn’t come to meeting that particular performance “parameter”?

We’ve written several times about the Mayfield Estates homeowners who foolishly bought or built in a neighborhood without storm sewers and now are outraged that the City won’t flood-proof their neighborhood for them.

We’ve called them “freeloaders” for demanding that all City taxpayers bail them out, literally and figuratively, because that neighborhood’s homeowners didn’t want to spend the money to install sewers back when it was annexed to Park Ridge 50 years ago – or ever since. And from what we have read and heard, the folks running City government at the time of annexation were too stupid (or corrupt?) to require that the sewers be built as a condition to annexation.

So far City government wisely has told them “no,” unless they are willing to vote for a cost-sharing Special Service Area (“SSA”) or let all City voters weigh in via a referendum. And, so far, those Mayfield Estates folks are adamantly opposed to either option.

That’s their choice. Perhaps they’re hoping for a change in the Council next April and the election of more aldermen willing to act irresponsibly with other people’s money (a/k/a, “OPM”).

But now we’ve got a new group of residents knocking on the door and City Hall looking for OPM to subsidize the unpleasant consequences of another collection of deals the City did with developers of multi-family enclaves like Boardwalk (circa 1972), Bristol Court (circa 1967), Park Lane (circa 1972) and Park Ridge Pointe (1996), which we will collectively refer to as the “Associations.”

DISCLAIMER: The editor of this blog lives in Bristol Court.

Back when these planned-development enclaves were built the developers cut deals with the City to avoid having to comply with then-existing building code requirements. They kept all of the property in these developments “private,” and agreed to provide many customary City services through assessments of their homeowners. The deal the developers cut, however, didn’t involve property tax abatements to reflect the lack of certain City services.

Now the Associations want to change those deals, claiming they should get full City services for the full City taxes they pay.

Why?

Weren’t those the special deals the developers of these Associations cut with the City just so their enclaves could be built? Didn’t those deals allow the developers to benefit from below-City standard infrastructure, thereby lowering the prices of those residences? If so, the residents now beefing about the situation have nothing to complain about because those special deals might be the only reason they are living where they are living.

The 08.19.14 Memorandumfrom City Attorneys Buzz Hill and Kathie Henn sets out what seem to be pretty compelling legal arguments for why the Associations are barking up the wrong tree.

According to recent articles in both local newspapers, however, that didn’t stop Lee Tate, president of Park Ridge Pointe, from criticizing what he viewed as a “cavalier” attitude by City officials toward the Associations’ plight. He also claims he can’t understand why Association homeowners have to pay City taxes and Association assessments just because the developer got a special deal.

Gee, Mr. Tate, maybe you should ask Park Ridge Pointe’s developer, or whomever you purchased your unit from. But if you didn’t know what you were buying into when you acquired your unit, then shame on you and/or your real estate attorney for being stupid or negligent. And shame on you and your fellow Association homeowners for now expecting the City to bail you out of the deal you should have known about because – as is pointed out in the City Attorney Memorandum – that deal is reflected in both a City ordinance (No. 95-52) and Park Ridge Pointe’s Declaration.

If these Associations or their individual residents believe they have legal rights to the City services they haven’t been getting, however, then they should dig in their own pockets and hire a good lawyer to make their case to the City. They should even sue the City if they have a valid claim that the City won’t honor. But we haven’t heard or seen anything to date that would suggest these Associations or their members have any greater legal rights to the subsidy they’re looking for than do the Mayfield Estates folks for storm sewers that they or their predecessor homeowners should have paid for decades ago.

Which is why these Associations are whining and badgering the Council into giving them handouts they don’t deserve.

We’ve often criticized the lack of transparency and accountability from the two local taxing bodies who take more money out of Park Ridge property taxpayers’ pockets – approximately 66% combined – than all other taxing bodies cumulatively: Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 and Maine Township High School District 207.

Not surprisingly, both those governmental units have mastered the art of extracting larger and larger amounts of tax dollars from the citizenry while at the same time avoiding accountability for producing lower and lower levels of measurable performance and student achievement.

Nevertheless, both of those school districts have a cadre of committed apologists who respond to any criticism of their favored district in knee-jerk reactionary fashion. You can see prime examples of such reactions in the comments to our 08.29.14 postabout D-207’s Board member appointment process – although it should be noted that 28 of those 45 comments existing as of the publishing of this post (8/29 at 10:11, 10:31, 10:47, 10:56 and 11:06 p.m.; 8/30 at 7:10, 7:35, 8:10, 9:22, 9:24, 9:43 a.m. and 5:30, 5:37, 5:43, 6:36, 7:07 and 7:23 p.m.; 8/31 at 8:46 a.m. and 1:58 p.m.; 9/1 at 11:31 a.m. and 12:05, 12:11, 2:34, 2:54 and 3:34 p.m.; and 9/2 at 3:53, 4:24 and 4:40 p.m.) were submitted by the same person.

A shy D-207 Board member, perhaps? Or a Board member’s spouse? Or just a D-207 toady?

Maybe that’s why we got some perverse satisfaction from the story in the current edition of the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate, “District 64 to hold Sept. 8 hearing on proposed budget,” (09.03.14), about tonight’s budget hearing scheduled for 7:15 p.m. at Jefferson School, 8200 Greendale Ave., in Niles.

Actually, it wasn’t the hearing itself that provoked a wry smile. It was wondering how the D-64 Board members could maintain straight faces while announcing the opportunity for members of the community to comment on the proposed 2014-15 budget while the District’s grossly overpaid (at close to $220,000 this school year) budget manager, Rebecca Allard, was declining to share the budget’s total revenues and expenses until the hearing itself because “[t]here are adjustments [to the budget] that the board has not seen.”

So much for any interested taxpayers or the local press showing up tonight with any advance knowledge of arguably the two most important components of that budget: revenues and expenses. And in addition to no final revenue and expense totals, Allard also said that the amount the District plans to spend on capital improvements won’t be disclosed before the hearing, either.

Just when we thought D-64 and its Board couldn’t be any less transparent or accountable, they give us a game of 20 questions masquerading as a “public budget hearing”…where even the Board members apparently won’t find out the answers until kick0ff!

That’s exactly what we’d expect out of Allard and the rest of the illusionists who run D-64 like a Vegas magic act, using sleight of hand to convince trusting and/or gullible parents and taxpayers alike that the tens of millions of dollars D-64 shakes them down for each year really do turn into marvelous educational achievement of equivalent or even greater value. Or into a white tiger, depending on whether you attend the matinee or the dinner show.

And, unfortunately, these D-64 Board members – whom we elected and entrusted with the duty to ensure that every tax dollar is spent in the most prudent manner so as to maximize its value to the students whom are its intended beneficiaries – are either bigger rubes than the rest of us in the audience, or they’re actually part of the act and charged with getting us to look in the wrong direction so that we miss the bureaucrats’ false shuffles and their palming of the Ace of Spades.

Worse yet, the H-A article states that the D-64 Board approved a tentative budget back in July. So it appears that, for the past 30-plus days, Allard and her financial munchkins have been diddling each other when they should have been crunching numbers. Or they’ve actually been engaging in a deliberate effort to bamboozle the taxpayers by keeping enough loose ends and empty places in the budget so that neither the public nor the press can ask informed questions at tonight’s “public” hearing.

And if that means the D-64 Board is kept in the dark, so much the better – because neither the current Board nor any of its predecessor boards have let even pitch-blackness stop them from rubber-stamping whatever the bureaucrats du jour hand them. So even though the taxpayers – and the Board, apparently – have no idea what Allard’s “adjustments” will be tonight, that didn’t stop them from moving the process forward on what the H-A article blithely reports to be salary increases of 4.9%, along with an approximately 4% increase in benefits.

How many of you D-64 taxpayers are getting a 4.9% salary increase this year? How about a 4% benefit increase?

Actually, we’re not exactly sure where that 4.9% comes from, because Page 13 of the latest draft (No. 3) of the “Tentative Budget Review” dated September 8, 2014, states: “The [Educational Fund] salary budget is estimated to increase by $2,304,229 or 5.3% over the previous year’s actual expense.” And Page 15states that “[s]alaries are anticipated to increase by $99,147 or 3.8%…[as] a result of 3.5% increases for all custodial and maintenance staff.”

As we’ve come to expect when dealing with public sector raises, none of these salary and benefit increases appear to be tied in any understandable way to measurably-improved employee performance, whether that comes in the form of more work performed, or the same amount of work performed in a better way, or some other objective measurement.

We also find it interesting that, according to Page 26of the Tentative Budget Review, even though Board Policy 4:20 requires the District to maintain “four (4) months of operating expenditures” in reserve, the tentative budget projects year-end 2014-15 reserves of double that.

Can you say “slush fund”?

But our very favorite part of the budget documents is the Executive Summary section titled “Investments in Student Learning 2014-15,” which can be found on Pages 2-4.

It starts out talking about a “five-year plan” named “Journey of Excellence” whose “original planning horizon” has been reached, thereby requiring the creation of “a new multi-year Strategic Plan.” The irony of how the old Soviet Union always implemented five-year plans – which were never successful before being replaced by the next five-year plan that also never hit its marks – apparently was lost on budget-drafter Allard, despite her $220,000 annual compensation.

And judging by the District’s lackluster performance these past five years (and by what might be its adverse effects on Maine South’s rankings), the “Journey of Excellence” might not even qualify as “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”

The rest of that Executive Summary is loaded with edu-speak like: “Strategic Plan implementation activities will continue to be embedded within the District’s overall initiatives,” “job-embedded coaching,” “instructional shifts,” “[m]ath intervention for struggling learners,” “curricular pacing guides,” “supplemental learning experiences,” “dynamic and differentiated opportunities,” and what must be the term of the year for 2014-15: “release time.”

No matter where in Park Ridge you may live, it seems like all of us are susceptible to airplane noise as some time or other.

Where once the noise tended to track the northeast to southwest paths of runways 22R and 22L, the construction and opening of east-west runway 9L/27R has shifted the noise bombardment to areas of town that never had it before – although the old runways are still used on days when wind conditions or runway maintenance dictate. And there’s another new east-west runway on the drawing board that also will impact Park Ridge.

The new runways are part and parcel of the O’Hare Modernization Program (“OMP”), the evil brainchild of former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley (a/k/a, “Shortshanks,” a/k/a “Li’l Richie,” a/k/a the “Dumbest But Best Name Recognition”) and designed to help replace the revenue Li’l Richie gave away to the Spanish consortium that bought the Skyway, and to a Morgan Stanley-led partnership that bought Chicago’s parking meters.

When the OMP was still in the planning stage, Park Ridge was governed by mayor Ron Wietecha, an O’Hare-obsessed buffoon who deluded himself into believing that he could make Shortshank’s blink. Wietecha didn’t even try to get Park Ridge a seat at the O’Hare bargaining table, preferring instead to blow well over $1 million taxpayer bucks on battling O’Hare as part of a Suburban O’Hare Commission (“SOC”) even as it was losing members faster than the Black Knight lost limbs in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

Wietecha was followed by interim-mayor Mike Marous, who didn’t give a rat’s derriere about O’Hare because he was obsessed with Uptown Redevelopment. Park Ridge no longer was wasting money on SOC during his administration, but feel free to thank him and his rubber-stamp council for saddling Park Ridge taxpayers with the $23 million in red ink the Uptown TIF is projected to produce by 2027.

Marous’s successor, Howard Frimark, was so clueless he didn’t even know what the OMP was until it opened up the new runway in 2008 and irate taxpayers began bombarding him with complaints about “Mayor Daley’s Air Force” strafing the 5th and 6th wards.

That brings us to the present.

Mayor Dave Schmidt and the Park Ridge O’Hare Airport Commission have been trying to get Shortshanks’ lapdog, the O’Hare Noise Compatibility Commission (“ONCC”) and its long-time chair-princess, Arlene Mulder, to support Park Ridge’s request for a supplemental Environmental Impact Study (“EIS”). We wrote about Mulder’s obsolescence in our 08.07.14 post, and we have every reason to expect that Mulder will continue to do whatever she can to frustrate Park Ridge’s bid for noise relief that might possibly result in more noise over her Arlington Heights home/political base.

A supplemental EIS could qualify Park Ridge residents for various forms of noise relief, including soundproofing. And it might also give us some leverage for turning “Fly Quiet” from a mere suggestion into an enforceable mandate.

While those aren’t perfect solutions by any stretch of the imagination, they would be a significant improvement over anything the Wietecha, Marous and Frimark administrations achieved.

Tomorrow morning (September 5) at 8:00 a.m., the ONCC will be holding an open meeting at De Paul’s O’Hare Campus, 8770 West Bryn Mawr (just south of the Kennedy and west of Cumberland). Park Ridge Mayor Dave Schmidt will be there to renew Park Ridge’s request for ONCC support for the supplemental EIS.

And this time he has an additional arrow in his quiver: a letter from Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D. Ill.) advocating Park Ridge’s position on the supplemental EIS, even if she does appear to bend over backwards to kiss Mulder’s and ONCC Executive Director Jeannette Camacho’s derrieres.

Rumor has it that residents of other OMP-impacted communities (e.g., Norridge, Harwood Heights, Chicago’s Edison Park neighborhood, Wood Dale, et al.) will be in attendance to support the supplemental EIS. You Park Ridge homeowners hit especially hard by the OMP’s new runway could do worse than showing up in support of the supplemental EIS and other forms of relief from the airplane noise that has bedeviled you the last few years.

Because that may be the only realistic chance at meaningful relief from new O’Hare runway noise we’ve got.

UPDATE (09.06.14) We hear the crowd was so big at yesterday’s ONCC meeting at DePaul’s O’Hare Campus that more people may have been turned away than typically attend those meetings. And from the accounts we received of the meeting itself, we wish there were a video of it – because viewers could have laughed and cried about what passes for the quasi-government of the ONCC.

Chair-princess Mulder was her customary obstructionist self when it came to Mayor Schmidt’s call for an ONCC vote in support of the supplemental EIS (“SEIS”) instead of waiting for a “re-evaluation” that FAA rep/Chicago shill Barry Cooper claimed was a prerequisite to any SEIS – a re-evaluation that is not scheduled to be finished until Fall 2015. Not surprisingly, Cooper could provide no legal authority for his re-evaluation claim when challenged by Schmidt, presumably because there appears to be none.

As we understand it, the FAA can order an SEIS whenever it chooses, if only to allay the communities concerns about noise and health/safety.

Despite the efforts of Mulder, meeting chair Frank “Empty Suit” Damato (a former Chicago alderman and Crook County commissioner, go figure), and ONCC executive director Jeanette “Just Empty” Camacho (somebody important’s “niece”?), Schmidt was able to muster enough support to get the SEIS vote on the ONCC’s October meeting agenda.

Between now and then, expect all sorts of behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the ONCC’s executive committee – headed by Mulder, Damato and Camacho, the meetings of which are not even listed on the ONCC website – to kibosh a favorable SEIS vote. But even if it is held and prevails, it is not binding on the FAA.

That’s when we’ll get to see just how serious Rep. Schakowsky is about looking out for her noise-oppressed constituents.